When I signed up for broadband TV I thought I chose the cheapest package. Recently, I threatened to cancel because of price increases and that produced an interesting disclosure from the company. I could save $20 a month if I cut back to broadband network channels only.

I wish I’d known that in the first place since I wasn’t even watching the other channels in my package. (If you had my package you probably wouldn’t either)

Connecting and being part of a community are in my dreams. Church provides opportunities for those. It used to be the ‘right package’ because everything in it was important to me.

Now I’m looking for ‘connection and community only’ packages. I don’t have a dream church (our current theme) because all churches include things that wouldn’t be in my dream package.

Part of Jesus’ prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane the night before he was crucified, according to this new novel.

I’ve been helping with churchrater.com, a website where anyone and everyone can post their rating of any church in the US.

This week ChurchRater was featured on Seattle’s King5 news and written about in the Seattle Times.

This publicity has brought more more feedback, some of it negative. Christians are worried that ChurchRater will damage the church and nothing good can come out of it.

I know you don’t all participate in church anymore, but even so, what do you think? Is ChurchRater likely to hurt or help churches?

I won’t take it personally if you don’t approve of it so fire away.

My children are like me…this morning Esther wanted to go to Target for something and when I asked Ben if he’d like to come along he said yes.

They never ask if we can go to church. So evidently they too see more value in shopping than church on Sunday morning.

I used to love going to church. I was there every Sunday, ready to worship God with my Christian friends and learn more about how to be a faithful Christian. I volunteered at church as much as my family circumstances would allow. I was “one of the faithful”—not perfect but doing my best to seek God and go in the direction he wanted me to go.

Sometimes as I read the Bible, or observed the world around me, it was hard to understand God’s ways. I always gave him the benefit of the doubt, though. I assumed that my inability to understand was because he was God, and I was only human.

I thought I was open enough to give any evidence for or against God a fair hearing. Yet how could I have been open when I responded to everything by trying to make it fit what the Bible said? If I couldn’t make it fit, I’d shrug and assume it was because I couldn’t see things from God’s perspective. So much for me being open. In fact my belief system was an impenetrable fortress.

A few years ago some difficult personal circumstances drove me to ask new questions. I started wondering, “Can I afford to be this trusting and accepting about everything concerning God and the Bible? Is it wise of me to so heavily discount what I see and hear just because it doesn’t easily fit what the Bible says? Maybe what I should be discounting is what the Bible says, not the evidence of my own eyes and ears.”

I knew I was venturing into territory where Christians warn each other not to go. Yet rather than turning back, I continued on. I began evaluating the God of the Bible according to my human standards. Why? Because I realized I needed my God to exceed the best standards I could imagine.

How did God do? Not so well. I finally admitted that an all-powerful, all-knowing God who hadn’t been able to figure out how to save most of humanity from eternal torment seemed meaner than I was.

I was no longer sure I liked, trusted or believed in God enough to want a personal relationship with him. I decided that I needed to stop trying to have one, so I could find out if I missed it. From then on I stopped all my attempts to talk to God (personal prayer) and listen to him (personal prayer and Bible reading).

I barely told anyone and especially not my Christian friends. I didn’t want to go from being “one of the faithful” in their eyes to “a problem that needed fixing.” I went to church and outwardly participated as I always had. It made me feel like a hypocrite, and I would rather have been honest, but I was afraid of the repercussions.

My desire to be a better person was as strong as ever. And I couldn’t help thinking that if God did exceed my own standards, surely how I lived was what really mattered to God—not what I believed.

Surely such a God wouldn’t mind that I wasn’t praying or reading the Bible. He’d say, “Hey, don’t worry about it. I understand. You do what you need to do. I’m here if you change your mind.”

I was happy not praying or reading the Bible. I loved the freedom of simply doing what I felt moved to do. I no longer had to conform to “what the Bible teaches,” yet was free to if a passage came to mind which I liked. I was pleased that now I wasn’t trying to guess at God’s will. I’d eradicated any risk of confusing his with mine.

These days I think I could convince people I’m an atheist. Yet I still want to live according to what I saw in Jesus’ life. I still remember what the Bible says and feel called to “respond Biblically” when I face challenging situations. Sometimes I wonder whether my strange, un-Christian practice of deliberately not cultivating a personal relationship with God hasn’t actually given him more freedom to work through me, not less.

I finally stopped going to church last year. I’m in the process of “coming out” to my Christian friends. Some people (not Bible-believing Christians) have suggested I try a more liberal church. But I don’t want to belong to any group claiming their way to God is superior to some other group’s way.

All I want to do is get on with my life and respect how other people get on with theirs—as long as they’re trying to make the world a better place.

Church wasn’t helping me do that. That’s why I’m not going any more.